


streets and skies and open doors

by Esmenet



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Anthropomorphism - Freefom, Cities, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-17
Updated: 2011-03-17
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esmenet/pseuds/Esmenet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A city is not just walls and secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	streets and skies and open doors

The City calls. It calls to refugees, to farmers, to warlords and priests and doctors and soldiers and scholars. It calls to everyone, for like all living things it wants to grow, and grow it does. The walls constrain the City and keep it safe, so it reaches up and presses in, begins to make even the wealthiest residents regret the cost of their sprawling homes.

 _Come here,_ it sings. _Come here and make me strong._

And they do. They bring books and green growing things, new tastes smells sights sounds ideas. Sometimes they try to hurt the City, with fire and anger and big points of metal, but the City needs fire for cooking and anger for strength and points of metal to cut food and help the walls of its tall tall buildings stay light and strong, so it lets them in on the condition that they stay.

The City sings to the ones that are here even louder than to the ones that come. _Build strong, remember well, be at peace,_ it sings. They all hear but only a few notice, the ones who dress in heavy cloth and wear pieces of old buildings on their hands and feet, them and the one who lives in the palace and never leaves. The City sings special songs to them, songs of the past and the future that comes after.

It remembers the days when it was a place of tunnels and caverns and little holes for air. Even now, those are full of people -- though they don't live there, not truly. It remembers the men and women who first began to lay out streets, the first time its rock shifted into boxy shapes with bigger holes for air. It remembers its first wall, and the second, and the third, all the ones it grew over and with. Some of those stones are in the palace now, some of them are in houses and roads and shops. One is seat of a smith's anvil; another a teashop's counter. One is a case for scrolls. Perhaps its walls now will someday be in other walls, too, but it thinks not. This is a good size for a city, a good balance between walls and food-space.

"Mother," the inhabitants call it. "Sister. Comrade-in-arms. This great big ugly place. Our city. Home."


End file.
